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In last week’s follow-up post about community (‘Can we just hang out?’), I mentioned the advantages of doing the obvious—that is, actually teaching our people about the nature of membership and community. But how well do we do this kind of thing? I said this:

I am often struck by how meagrely and haphazardly we teach about such subjects in our churches. We do the essential work of expounding the Scriptures week by week, and we also study Bible passages in our small groups (often the same ones). But the integrative work of applied theology—that is, the task of drawing the Bible’s teaching on a subject together, and showing what it means for our lives … this is something we do much less often, and less effectively.

I promised some further thoughts, and here they are.

Has it ever occurred to you (as it occurred to me recently) that when we preach an expository sermon on, say, 1 Corinthians 1:18-31, we are doing something different from what the passage itself is doing?

What I mean is that our process starts with the biblical text—with understanding it, expounding it, and then applying its truths to our lives. The content of our preaching is initiated by the authoritative Scriptural text and flows from there to the minds, hearts and lives of our listeners.

This is exactly how it should be, you say, and I entirely agree.

But it is interesting that this is not how 1 Corinthians 1 itself proceeds. Its point of departure is not a text being expounded but a subject being addressed. In whatever way we describe the issue or problem Paul is tackling at Corinth—factionalism, divisiveness, arrogance, worldly wisdom—Paul crafts this chapter as a response to this. He draws on a theology of the cross in order to teach the Corinthians that their arrogance and factionalism is ridiculously wrong and out of place.

I guess you could say that Paul is practising applied systematic theology. When we preach the passage, though, we are practising applied biblical theology—that is, we take the text as it is given to us in Scripture, expound and explain it in its own terms and according to its literary and biblical context, and apply its message to our hearers. The same is true for the small Bible study group that opens this passage, seeks to understand it together and apply it to one another’s lives. We start with the Bible, and let its message shape our discussion and mutual encouragement.

Again (in case you’re worried) let me re-assert that this is just as it should be.

In fact, as I look back on nearly four decades of Christian thinking and ministry, one of the features of the evangelical movement for which I am most thankful has been the consistent and vigorous effort to restore expository preaching and Bible study to the centre of our churches and ministries. God’s word is the lamp to our feet. We should humbly and contritely tremble before his speech in Scripture, and listen. This is what the ‘expository movement’ (if I can call it that) has sought to recover. And praise God that in many places it has succeeded.

This is especially so when we consider the alternative that we’ve been working to overcome—the kind of topical preaching that starts with a biblical text and then springboards off into the topic that the preacher wants to speak about; or the therapeutic preaching that starts with the felt need in our lives and tries to solve it; or the moralistic or political preaching that is always taking its subject from the latest social issue or moral outrage; or even the systematic theology kind of preaching that preaches an important (or favourite) doctrine but never actually pauses to listen to and expound the text.

Topicality is certainly dangerous. It not only runs the risk of replacing God’s agenda with ours, but frequently l